Only in the world of Italian exploitation cinema would it be possible for a guy to write two movies in a year, both featuring main characters named Trash wandering around in a world gone mad, but manage to rip off two completely different mainstream movies! And there could only be one screenwriter in all of Italy able to simultaneously rip himself off, but yet be completely original by having one film feature a male Trash and one feature a female Trash! And only this man, Dardano Sacchetti, could also write three other movies in the same year! Read More

When was it during The Expert that I realized I was watching the “Most Underrated Jeff Speakman Movie I Only Vaguely Remember Hearing About When It Came Out?” Was it when Speakman took his date to the museum with the giant statute of a woman who represented justice or liberty or whatever and proclaimed that he came for the solitude? Or was it when the warden of a prison proudly announced to the gathered media that he had catered that night’s execution? Surely, it had to be that time when Speakman was run over by a car in an alley behind a bar and then proceeded to beat the holy hell out of the four guys inside of it – all while rocking a kick ass jean jacket! Read More

Director Ferdinando Baldi (Duel of the Champions, Warbus) and writer/star Tony Anthony began the 3D revival in the 1980s with the spaghetti western Comin’ At Ya! and they also bring the Italian chapter of it to a close with Treasure Of The Four Crowns. As near as I can tell, those were the only two Italian 3D movies made, which means that they have to be that much more spectacular since all our Italian 3D needs will have to be satisfied by those two films for years to come! Well, you can rest easy, amigo because Treasure Of The Four Crowns has enough 3D action to fill a movie called Treasure Of The Five Crowns! Read More

This is a great movie. If you’re Thomas Ian Griffith. Excessive Force is Griffith’s masturbatory fantasy where he’s a tough cop who plays by his own rules. As the writer and star, Griffith manages to leave no stone unturned in search of every 12 year old boy’s idea of how these rogue cop movies are supposed to go. Which I would be totally in favor of if Griffith wasn’t such a tool. Read More

If you enjoyed the delightfully incompetent Super Seven Calling Cairo and wondered where director Umberto Lenzi honed his talents in making uninspired James Bond knock offs that take place in Cairo, 008 Operation Exterminate provides the pleasingly appalling answer. It’s all here – the pointless trip to the pyramids, the tacked on trip to a colder country (this time it’s Germany instead of Switzerland), the gadgets that surely only seemed awesome to Umberto, and of course the obligatory, but quite embarrassing reference to Ian Fleming’s James Bond himself! (I’m not watching a spy movie just to see secret agent Frank Smith lounging at the hotel pool with his copy of Live and Let Die! Hell, I could do that myself and I don’t even have a license to kill!) Read More

Sometimes at work Aki sees a little boy in the movie theatre. His name is Hideki. You may recall Hideki as the name of the little freak from Evil Dead Trap that sort of lived inside his homicidal brother and ran around killing people (or was that his homicidal brother and Hideki was along for the ride?). As confusing and stupid as the Hideki character was in Evil Dead Trap, they manage to take things to a whole new level in this one. Read More

Nami is the host a late night talk show and one of the segments they do is to feature home videos that their fans send in. It shouldn’t come as any big surprise that the kind of people who would stay up real late to watch an ugly Japanese woman do a talk show, might be a chopstick shy of a pair, if you catch my meaning. One of the viewer submitted tapes shows someone going through the city and ending up at an abandoned factory where a woman is tortured and killed. To establish that this is one of those “over the top” movies we get a nice long, loving shot of a knife going into her eyeball. Nami is horrified and does what any of us would do. She gets four members of her crew together and they follow the landmarks that were on the video tape and go to the abandoned factory. Read More

Evelyn Prentice follows that time-honored tradition of having a comedy team appear in a dramatic vehicle where the most drama you get is in just how bad they are when they are trying to be deadly serious (see also Tracy and Hepburn in Keeper of the Flame). This domestic/courtroom melodrama is certainly deadly in every aspect of its execution right down to the irritating little kid that gets trotted out whenever they want to make some point about how much the dad is neglecting his family or how mommy should own up to killing the guy she started running around with just because dad was neglecting the family. William Powell and Myrna Loy, arguably the best duo of the sophisticated comedies of the nineteen thirties (Libeled Lady, Double Wedding, The Thin Man series) look entirely disinterested in every thing that transpires here as they sluggishly shamble somnambulantly through their roles as John and Evelyn Prentice, a well heeled couple that encounters problems once they start to drift apart. Read More

The movies culled from re-editing multi-part episodes of the old Disneyland TV series are a mixed bag. Some of them like Dr. Syn, Alias The Scarecrow stand with any of Walt’s theatrical projects in terms of story, production values, and execution. Others, such as The Mystery In Dracula’s Castle suffer from weak scripts and a decidedly workmanlike effort both in front of and behind the camera. Escapade In Florence falls somewhere in between these two extremes as its hampered by a lousy script, but is made bearable by the location shooting in Florence, Italy and the winning performances of stars Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello. Read More

Who was that masked man with the hairy lower back? That would be Don Diego de Vega, otherwise known as Zorro and I think that after seeing this movie, if Zorro was a real person, he would never reveal his secret identity more out of sheer embarrassment than out of any need to protect himself. Producer David F. Friedman has previously tormented us with his yucky sex comedies in such varied vehicles of vulgarity as The Head Mistress, The Notorious Daughter Of Fanny Hill, and Trader Hornee. In all of the films, low production values and lame humor share the stage with actors who seem almost relieved when it comes time for them to lose their clothes, roll around with one of their ugly co-stars and stop having to remember their lines. The Erotic Adventures Of Zorro, at 102 minutes, takes advantage of this format to its fullest and manages to showcase several lethargic bumping and grinding scenes to no good effect. Read More